What Is An AI-First Mindset?

As AI becomes an increasing part of our daily lives, people are starting to change the way they perform their daily tasks. The idea of incorporating AI into everyday activities is gradually becoming less of a thing people have to do with careful forethought to something that is being done increasingly with default afterthought.

Of course, everybody’s using generative AI tools to write documents, emails, business reports, homework, and help with work and tasks of many types. Similarly, image generation is now built into so many tools that it’s becoming a default way of doing things, from creating presentations to images for marketing materials. People are realizing that AI tools can really help speed things up, make things more efficient, and provide that extra level of augmented guidance that improves overall output.

How AI Is Changing People’s Behavior

AI is changing the way people look for information online. In the past, and indeed still the present for most, when you wanted some information, you would just go onto your phone, laptop, or desktop machine and use your favorite search engine with a typed search to your query. You’d then find the answer after scrolling through the many entries listed and hopping across multiple websites. But now that conversational Large Language Models (LLMs) are accessible and easy to use, people are just asking their LLM for direct answers. This is changing people’s behaviors in terms of how they seek answers to their needs. And as it changes people’s behaviors, it’s really changing people’s mindsets.

This is the idea of the AI-first mindset. As AI increasingly provides people with advantages, people are starting to act differently with AI so they can incorporate those advantages into their everyday lives. At a high level, an AI first mindset represents an intentional approach to integrating AI into all aspects of your life, both personal and professional. The AI-first mindset involves prioritizing and using AI as your primary interaction for things like decision making, innovation, communication, creativity, and problem solving.

An individual with an AI first mindset not only embraces AI technologies, but also knows how to appropriately use them, what they’re best suited for, and they continually seek out opportunities to leverage AI to enhance and optimize their existing skill sets. The idea of the AI-first mindset embraces the idea of augmented intelligence, in which you are not using AI to replace what you’re doing, but rather to help do your job better.

What Does it Mean to Have an AI-First Mindset?

One of the ways that you know that someone is embracing an AI first mindset is if you observe that their home screen or default front page of their browser or laptop is a conversational chat interface to an LLM and not, say, a search engine or some default portal or informational home page. The first thing that these users see when they open up their laptop or they open up a browser is an LLM, which suggests a shift in the way they’re thinking. These individuals consider starting their interactions first with an AI conversation rather than a search or a generic informational page. That small change is potent in that they’re integrating AI into their daily life and work and thinking to use AI first before anything else.

This idea of putting AI as your default interaction helps you realize very quickly what AI is good for because you’re using it all the time. You could see when AI is working well, and you could see when AI is not working well because it’s part of your daily life. People who start their interactions with an AI conversation will know inherently where AI will them up, augment, or enhance something they’re doing. People with an AI-first mindset will inherently know to use AI systems for complex tasks where AI performs well, such as working with large data sets, summarizing or analyzing information quickly, or interactively diving deeper into data and content.

Those with an AI-first mindset also inherently will know when AI systems are not good for a task. They know that LLMs are not super smart entities, they’re just tools. They also know that garbage in is garbage out when it comes to LLMs. This means people with an AI-first mindset will become much better at working with data going into and coming out of AI systems. That also drives people to be more data driven because then they can feel more confident about the outputs of the AI systems they are increasingly depending on.

An AI-First Mindset Means a Growth Mindset

Since AI is constantly evolving, and the capabilities of the tools and sophistication of users grows every day, a growth mindset becomes increasingly important. With a growth mindset, it’s not that you don’t necessarily know something or can’t do something, but rather that you don’t know it yet or can’t do it yet. With AI, the expectation will be that you can know or do something in the future as long as you keep improving and iterating your skills. This forms the idea of being a life-long learner with an emphasis on being data literate and improving your prompt engineering skills.

The interesting irony is that the more we work with technical AI systems, the more that interpersonal, human, “soft” skills become more important. The more you use AI, the more you have to be better at the things that AI is not good at such as creativity, problem solving, critical thinking, collaborating with others and communication because AI is going to do the other things well. So being in that AI-first mindset means that you have to master these soft skills. If you’re not good at the soft skills, you won’t be able to truly gain all the advantages from AI systems because you’ll just be cutting and pasting things from AI systems, or simply not leveraging them to their fullest potential.

If you want to have an AI first mindset then you need to interact and iterate with AI systems in a way that helps you develop that reflex for AI so that you are inherently using AI in a highly valuable way while knowing where AI provides real benefit, and where it is not a good fit.